Asperger’s study asks: Are hackers cognitively different? | Security & Privacy – CNET News : “The researchers observed that 9 percent of attendees identified as female, yet their survey distribution focused on female attendees (and followed a strict gender binary) to place respondents’ gender ratio to a nearly even skew with 49 percent male respondents and 51 percent female. … When asked if they felt there was equal opportunity for women and other visible minorities in both work and hacker culture, 79 percent of the males said yes — while 38 percent of the women agreed.”

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4 thoughts on “To Hit Armor Class Linkspam (7 September, 2012)”

The USA stagehands union (IATSE) had their more-or-less annual test to select the next batch of apprentices (first step towards joining the union), and I noticed that something like 10% of the 300 or so people there were women. This was higher than expected, as my recollection was that theater tech tended to be male-only, and IATSE has long had the reputation for being a particularly ingrown and nepotistic union.

Any theater techies, or friends of theater techies here, who might be able to comment more? Is this a (positive) trend?

(I would have put this on an open thread, but the last one is a month old.)
(Also, the blog changes post now has comments closed — where should we post comments about the website?)

The above appears to be a sub-set of the same article. Was the part that’s relevant to Geek Feminism cut out? Is selecting a sample with almost equal numbers of males and females the relevant thing? If so is that good, bad, or just different?

Personally, I think the sample was an interesting and odd choice, but there isn’t any discussion of it in the CNET article in terms of whether it’s good, bad or just different.

I would say the main gf relevant bit is: “When asked if they felt there was equal opportunity for women and other visible minorities in both work and hacker culture, 79 percent of the males said yes — while 38 percent of the women agreed.”

Ellie: Thanks for that. It’s started working for me now, I guess CNET just had some transient outage, maybe just affecting the CDN for my region.

The article starts badly by attributing “little professor” to the NYT magazine, that term was used by Hans Asperger in 1944.

Anyway it’s noteworthy that they claim that males report more harassment. It would be interesting to see the methodology that they used to determine that. The numbers of 21% and 19% seem unreasonably low regardless of gender (the general hacker culture is a fairly hostile environment).

I’ve never attended Black Hat or Defcon, I always got the impression that they wouldn’t be fun for me. I wonder if the way the reputation of those conferences excludes people like me affects the results of that research.

Also regarding the Autism Spectrum Quotient test, I only scored 25 when I did it online, but was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome anyway. Of course there are lots of reasons to be skeptical of Simon Baron-Cohen’s work, mainly everything related to the “Extreme Male Brain” hypothesis.